Hooray for Kindle! I found a Kindle version of the 8-volume Cambridge Medieval History by J.B. Bury from 1910 for a mere $2.99 a while back, and I’ve been slowly working my way through it. While I’m thoroughly enjoying it and finding it quite educational (and I love the fact that I can read a history without the filter of the last 100 years of American political revisionism), I am at a bit of a disadvantage due to the fact that the author’s assumed/intended audience had the benefit of a 19th-century British education. Mainly, this means that the author (or authors; it’s clear that Professor Bury didn’t write the entirety himself) assumed that there were certain things the reader would already understand without further explanation. For example, there have been several instances where an argument is summed up by quoting some ancient Roman writer in the original Latin without providing a translation. I’m 45, and Latin had already disappeared as a standard public school subject by the time I started grade school in 1971.
My first question: Who were the “Blues” and “Greens” in the Roman Empire? The author makes several references to them while discussing the latter centuries of the Roman Empire, and I can gather that they were opposing factions of some sort, but Bury never explicitly explains who they were. I can’t tell if they were rival political parties, or church factions, or what.
My second question relates to 8th-9th century personal names in Britain/Ireland/Scotland. I can’t help noticing the abundance of names that end with the suffixes “-berht” and “-red” and “-wald”. Not to mention the prefixes “Aethel-” and “Os-”. Do we know what these mean? Is the “-berht” suffix in Britain related to the “-bert” we see amongst Frankish names like Dagobert?
Any history will be affected by the age in which it was written. How has “American political revisionism” affected current thought on the Middle Ages? As you’ve discovered, you are up against the era in which every gentleman was assumed to have had a good classical education.
I think the Greens & Blues were colors worn by chariot teams in Byzantium–but their fans had greater differences than who they rooted for. Going back to not-so-ancient history: What if Yankees fans were all Republicans & Brooklyn Dodgers fans were all Democrats? Googling “blues greens byzantium” got this Wikipedia article.
I’d check out Anglo-Saxon/Old English for the nomenclature. Both the Irish & the Anglos missionized the Franks. (Is there a Tolkien in the house?)
Probably more of a “what”
Originally the Blues and Greens (and the Reds and Whites) were chariot-racing teams in Rome and other Roman cities.
In 5th and 6th century Byzantium the supporters of the Blues and Greens (they had more-or-less absorbed the other two) had grown into sort of combination social clubs, populist movements and streetgangs. They weren’t political parties, because they didn’t really have an agenda (other than wealth and influence for the bosses, handouts for the rank-and-file and of course doing down the other side), but their street muscle (and readiness to start riots) made them very influential in politics. You didn’t get far in Justinian’s Constantinople if you didn’t have one of the factions backing you - and Emperors and officials supported the factions in order to gain support.
In Bury’s day there was a theory that the Greens supported the Monophysites in Constantinople’s religious/political division and the Blues the Orthodox, but apparently modern scholarship has cast doubt on this.
I’m largely referring to my reading in this work on the rise and spread of Islam. Particularly, the “swordpoint conversions” I’ve heard about all my life, wherein Arab armies attacked cities and forced the residents to convert to Islam or die. According to Bury, it was actually more “economic conversion”. Cities were subjected by the Arabs, of course, but were allowed to keep their own religions; they simply had to pay a special tax that Muslims did not have to pay, and eventually many people “converted” simply to get out of paying the tax (which in turn eventually led to the tax being applied to Muslims as well, once the leaders realized the negative effect these “conversions” were having on revenue). Also that it wasn’t at all unusual amongst the peasantry to simply “convert” to the religion of whoever happened to be in charge.
E-yup. Reading this work has made me decide that I’m going to have to investigate other books to clarify a lot of things. Fortunately, I’m finding an awful lot of old scholarly works that are now in the public domain are available quite cheaply, or even free, for the Kindle.
Cool, that makes sense, in a fairly amusing way
Thanks! I should have picked up on the “Os=God” bit. My own last name, “Osborne”, developed out of the Old Norse “Asbjørn”, which meant “god bear” (referring to the “cave bear”, which was worshipped as a god in some primitive cultures).
If someone did not pay the jizya (the “special” tax) and did not convert, what happened? Imprisonment? Confiscation of property? And how DID Islam “spread”, exactly? Preaching? Debates? Elections?
Eh, I’m a Christian myself, so I’m not trying to defend Islam and would rather not get into that debate here. I’m just acknowledging that what’s “written in the book” and what actually happens in practice are often two different things (as has been historically plain within my own religion).
While admitting that Bury’s work here is a rather general overview and that I need (and want) to investigate more specialized books that give more detailed accounts of some of the topics/periods Bury covers, the impression I’ve gotten from Bury is that the Arab expansion wasn’t a whole lot different from the kind of expansionism practiced by the various European/Oriental peoples of the time. Religion was merely the unifying factor in the Arab case; before Islam, the Arab world apparently consisted of a handful of smallish cities and a bunch of wandering tribes that were constantly quarreling amongst themselves. Islam was used to unite them into an actual nation. And like any nation of the time that was looking for territorial expansion (as opposed to simple plunder), they understood the need for people to work the land (i.e. the peasantry), something their warriors were not suited to. Fact is, your army is going to starve if you simply move in and wipe out the existing population.
I’ll keep that in mind for next time. I ended up with the version I did after it popped up in a list of “you might also like…”. I’d actually started with buying the Cambridge Modern History, and then the Cambridge Medieval History was recommended so I bought it too, and am reading it first.
Most current scholarship on the spread of Islam & how non-Muslims fared after conquest agrees with Bury. (The history of Moorish Spain is especially fascinating.) Yes, you can pull fire-breathing quotations from ancient texts–check out parts of the Old Testament–but history is the study of what actually happened.
Books are like potato chips–you can’t eat just one! I’ve resisted getting a Kindle; I love my dusty paper. But access to obscure out of print works or classics I’ve never read have almost got me convinced…
And it sounds like you’ve already got a handle on the Germanic/Nordic languages.
Yeah, I’ve seen a number our Jewish Dopers who, when somebody brings up certain death-penalty offenses in the old Jewish law, will point out that those death penalties were rarely, if ever carried out.
I like paper books too, but I really like to keep my books after I’ve read them, and man do they start to take up space after a while. I also like to read when I’m eating in a restaurant, and the thick paperback fantasy novels I usually read are a royal pain to try to keep open while I eat. The Kindle has really been an improvement there.
Nope, not at all. I only knew the “Osborne = Asbjørn” thing because I decided one day to look up my last name on Wikipedia.
